The River’s Edge

I don’t have a smartphone. I’m not on Facebook. But it took a longer journey to truly feel free from prying eyes.

By Jacob Gursky

I’d been sitting on my
duffel bag in front of the gas station in Cantwell, Alaska, whose lonely gray
post office serves about 200 residents, for a half an hour when a big black
pickup truck pulled up. The window rolled down to reveal a rugged man with a
bushy moustache and a grey plaid shirt that had seen better days.

“You Jacob?” he
asked.

“Yeah.”

The door popped open. Mike Santos looked down at me,
taking stock.

“You got any callouses on those
hands?” he said.

“No, sir. But I’m ready to get some.”

He took a drag of his Kool
cigarette and smiled as he said, slowly, “Touchdown.”

Hard work on honest terms was one thing that had drawn me to
central Alaska to work for an Iditarod racer for the summer. But the real
reason was that I’d become disenchanted with the virtual world’s encroachment
on the real one, so I’d decided to try to escape the digital realm altogether.

If you asked my friends, most of them would say I’d
already done that at Penn. I don’t have a smartphone. I’m not on Facebook, or
Twitter, or Instagram. I don’t use a GPS assistant. I like getting lost, and
when I do leave home with my old-fashioned TracFone in my pocket, I often
remove its battery for long stretches. I’ve been wary of government and
corporate surveillance since I was in high school, but a turning point came for
me while I audited a “Privacy and Law” course at Penn Law, where I had a chance
to meet former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, who oversaw
the warrantless surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden. When I asked
him about the scope of the government’s ability to pry into people’s lives, he
replied, “If you give us the opportunity, we will take it as far as you will
let us.”

I do use my student email account,
but it rubs me the wrong way. A while back, I went on a date that had been a
lot of fun. A week later, an email from my companion landed in my school
account, which is hosted by Gmail. Gmail analyzes your messages to build
psychographic profiles from which Google can extract value; it is arguably the
most invasive surveillance tool ever invented. Before I read the email, I
looked at the automated response suggestions at the end:

[Ok] [Sounds good] [That’s great, thanks!]

Then I read the message. My date was informing me that
she’d been diagnosed with oral herpes. Now Google knew, and could serve me ads
accordingly. That’s great, thanks!

And even if you manage to elude Google or Facebook or
Amazon, there’s always a classmate to cheerfully conduct the data collection.
Like the time I found myself circled up with 15 friends, drinking and playing
“Never-Have-I-Ever.” If you’ve ever played it, you know the rules—the idea is
to coax other people to reveal intimate secrets about themselves. But a few
minutes in, one of my friends darted out of the room, and returned to place a
strange object in the center of the table. While others murmured with delighted
excitement, I asked her what it was.

“It’s a 360-degree camera” she said, “so I can
remember all of my friends and this moment.”

I don’t think that I’ve ever felt
more confused and out of place. My friends ultimately decided that hanging out
with me was worth the inconvenience of my objection to all of our secrets being
recorded for who knows what end. But it was obvious that I was the lone
stickler ruining the thrill for everyone else, and my reaction was somehow
considered extreme—as if I was a vegetarian who refused to even be in the
presence of meat.

In other circles, sometimes my friends have parties
where YouTube is projected on a big screen and everyone does their best to find
embarrassing videos of each other, many of which were not posted by their
subjects. This is the way we live now. Google catalogues our lives without our
consent, sometimes as early as elementary school, indelibly and forever, and
makes some of the juiciest bits available to anyone. Many of my peers respond
by turning it into something fun. Maybe they’ve accepted this surveillance and
exposure as inevitable, and have decided to make the best of it. Maybe they are
wiser than I am. Maybe I’m holding onto something that died with the first
iPhone, or that never existed at all. I honestly don’t know. I don’t know any
other world but this one.

Abstaining from social media means that I am left out
of a lot. One of the best things I started doing at Penn was to go out dancing.
My social world blossomed. But I remember evenings in the Quad where everyone
was dressed up to go out, following their phones like divining rods, and I was
left behind feeling miserable that the price of entry was surrendering whatever
semblance of privacy I still had, and vaguely cursed to be the only person
bothered by it. And even when I made it to the venue, there seemed inevitably
to come a point where someone would produce a phone and record the entire dance
floor. So I’d end up on Instagram every week anyway, even without an account.

Older generations might have
trouble imagining just how thoroughly college life has changed in this
regard—or how definitively the old ways have been jettisoned. Penn, for
instance, no longer offers landlines in the dormitories. “Only six or seven”
people on the entire campus request them each year, I was told, so why bother.
As an experiment, I went one semester without a cell phone. I learned that
there was only one working pay phone on campus (up the street from the Fresh
Grocer, which, incidentally, scans shoppers using automated facial-recognition
technology). There was another one in Houston Hall, but it didn’t work. I
mentioned this to a student canvassing for student government and she assured
me it would be taken care of. A few weeks later, it was ripped from the wall.

In Alaska, I had no internet
access and spent most my free time staring at mountains. It was lonely at
times, but I wouldn’t exchange the experience for anything. My boss, Mike, had
been mushing dogs since he was 18. Obsessed with polar explorers, he and his
wife had moved to Cantwell and rebuilt one of the first Denali homesteads by hand. He chopped down
trees on his property and built the tourist theater that is his livelihood.
Together, with their five-year-old son, they’ve created a rich life for
themselves.

When we had time off, we would
put down the buckets of dog food and venture into the wild around Denali
National Park. Often we’d go fly fishing, but occasionally we’d go just to be
in nature. One day in particular stands out in my memory. I was sitting on a
flat stone by the edge of a river, staring at rock that jutted out from the
current.

I jumped—suddenly Mike was behind
me.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m trying to imagine how that rock got there.”

“And?”

“I don’t know, maybe it rolled down the side of the
hill? Or maybe a glacier put it there?”

Mike laughed at me; it was an embarrassingly scanty
theory for the amount of time that I had sat there pondering. But, in that one,
stupid moment, I had a revelation:

Wherever I have been in my life,
I have almost never believed that I was truly alone. That I was not being
watched. I always feel like I am performing—that there’s a camera pointed at
me, or will be any second.

But, in that moment, by the river, something happened.

No one, I thought to myself, can
take staring at a rock in a river away from you.

There were no 360-degree cameras.
No algorithm was looking me up in a facial recognition database. There were no
cell towers to triangulate my location. I experience all those things as tiny
pieces of myself being removed and swept away to a server somewhere. People
always tell me, “I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear” from the
constant harvest of their data. For me, it’s different; I feel a loss of
autonomy at the point of collection, regardless of how my data is used. Here,
there was no one and nothing studying me or analyzing me. Next to this river, I
could just exist. It may sound melodramatic—and I think it would be if I
was writing this 20 years ago. But I had to go all the way to Alaska to find
that experience.

If anyone knows how to deal with feeling like they
were born in the wrong century, it’s a dog musher. Later that day I asked Mike
how he deals with it.

“Avoid people and drink lots of alcohol,” he said.

I grew quiet. He softened and spoke again, more
seriously: “Find something you love and find a way to make a living doing it.”

I stopped to think about this man I’d grown to admire.
For all his independence, even he was hardly beyond of the reach of modern
life. His business depends on TripAdvisor reviews, and the tourists from whom
he makes his living carry phone cameras all over the property. But by embracing
it for four months of the year, he’s free to spend the other eight exploring
the wilderness with his wife and son and dogs, enjoying some of the most
beautiful and untouched land in the world.

I didn’t go to Alaska to stay. I don’t
want to drop off the face of the grid and become a dog musher. But I do want to
find a better balance between my digital life and my real one, and I hope that
if Mike found one, I will find one too.